This invention relates to a dilator for application in the medical field.
As is known in the medical art, it is often necessary to dilate a surgical area.
To just review but a few exemplary cases, it happens in urology, and more specifically with urethral and ureteric lithiasis, that the presence of calculus requires dilation in order to facilitate the intervention and the expulsion of the calculous formation. Currently, in such cases as this, recourse is generally made either to a pharmacological therapy, with only moderately successful results, as the experts will recognize, or a set of catheters, made of metal or other materials, are employed which have gradually increasing diameters, such as to crush the calculous formation, or eventually surgical intervention is resorted to.
The introduction of catheters of gradually increasing sizes requires first of all considerable skill of the physician, while much time is required to achieve the desired dilation of the part.
A similar problem is encountered in obstetrics, where the obstetrician daily finds it necessary to dilate the uterine neck as a matter of routine.
To produce the cited dilation, several methods are known in the medical art, among which the laminae vegetales (still used, although infrequently), Champetier De Ribes's bladder, various dilators by now abandoned, and the Hegar dilators, the only ones left in this field.
The Hegar dilators are metal cones of progressively larger diameters, which are first introduced, left in situ for a while, and then extracted before applying higher diameter ones.
The results to be obtained with the cited dilators are good, provided that they are handled by a skilled hand, to avoid the risks of perforation and/or laceration as is the case whenever an object is introduced in tender parts of the human body.
The above merely reflects some examples of how frequently, in the various specializations, a physician is called upon to dilate tender parts of the human body by means which are not always entirely satisfactory, since they all exhibit limitations, potential hazards, and occasionally even applicational difficulties of a practical nature.